The New York Times culture reporter and star of “Page One” David Carr was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital after collapsing in the Times newsroom on Thursday. He was 58.

A media legend, Carr reported on every aspect of the the media business with brutal honesty and never took no for an answer. The veteran Times reporter represented the merge of traditional media with new-age technology and helped lead journalism into the digital age.

Carr was best known for his Monday column The Media Equation, which detailed media developments across platforms.

“David Carr was one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times,”  Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., The Times’s publisher and chairman, said in a statement.

Carr also initiated the Times’s Carpetbagger feature, a regular report from the red carpet during awards season.

David Michael Carr was born Sept. 8, 1956, in Minneapolis and graduated from the University of Minnesota, majoring in psychology and journalism.

A former drug addict, Carr detailed his struggle in 2008 memior “The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life–His Own.”  Carr lived in New Jersey with his wife, Jill, and had 3 grown children. In 2014 he was given a part-time professorship at Boston University. 

Carr has also been credited for launching Lena Dunham’s career. In 2010 Carr gave Dunham and her film “Tiny Furniture” 1,000 words in The Times and has since been called the “daddy” of HBO hit series “Girls.”

Photo courtesy Wikimedia, Creative Commons.